The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy

by Jack Williamson

  “She’s gone, right now,” White rumbled softly, “after palladium. Overstreet has discovered an alluvial deposit of it, you see, on a planet where men and the humanoids have never been. The nuggets are nearly pure, bearing only traces of rhodium and ruthenium. Dawn gathers them, and we smelt them here.”

  “That little child,” Claypool whispered blankly. “Gone to another world, alone?”

  “A necessary risk. We’ve got to have the metal. We reduce the danger as far as we can. Overstreet is watching her. The chief hazard is from Ironsmith and his peculiar allies.”

  Claypool nodded uneasily, asking:

  “What are you doing with the metal?”

  “That’s you’re province. Because it’s going to take a top-drawer rhodomagnetic engineer to rebuild those relays. Old Sledge could have done it, if we hadn’t fallen out. You’ll have to take his place.”

  The damp heavy air of the cave seemed very cold.

  “You don’t mean—?” Claypool stared at the red-bearded giant. “You can’t mean—?”

  But White nodded deliberately. “That’s it, Claypool. We’re going to send you to Wing IV. We’ll give you all the help we can. But the real job is yours, to rebuild the grid that controls the humanoids.”

  Claypool felt a sudden need for support. He clutched the rough edge of the workbench with cold awkward hands, and then he sat down on a wooden stool, to take the weight off his trembling knee.

  “To Wing IV?” He stared at White, in sick protest. “You know I can’t do teleportation.”

  He was haunted with the memory of his failure, when Dawn Hall had first tried to bring him here from Starmont. He didn’t understand the cause—unconscious resistance or anything else. He only knew that instantaneous translation was— physically—impossible. And still he hadn’t grasped the new science of paraphysics.

  “You’ll learn,” White was drawling. “You’ll have to learn enough to help us take you there.”

  But Claypool shook his head. A sweat had burst out on him, and he shook to a sudden claustrophobia. The damp air seemed too heavy and too still. He could see the crawling dark, waiting cold and eternal in every narrow fissure of the cave, and he heard the whispered mockery of water running through crevices too small for anything else.

  He felt all the weight of the rock above, and a pressure squeezed his chest. His stomach contracted, hard in him. The thumping of his heart became sharply painful, too fast and too loud. He moved his knee too quickly, and ignored the throb of pain.

  For there was no way out.

  No way in space, except for the narrow fissures and the deep gravel beds, where cold black waters ran. Every crevice and recess, all around that crystal dome, ended in clotted shadow and solid rock. The cavern was a grave, and he was buried here.

  Claypool set his chattering teeth, and grimly fought that fever of fear. Struggling in a chasm of horror, he clutched a feeble thread of reason. Desperately, he burst the constriction around his chest, and caught a sobbing breath. The crawling shadows receded again, and he turned weakly to White.

  “I’m sorry.” He managed a feeble grin. “It just hit me—a sort of shut-in feeling”—he bit his lip again, and clung for a moment to the scarred workbench—“because I just can’t do teleportation.”

  Towering magnificent beside him, White drawled quietly:

  “You’re a scientist, Claypool, and paraphysics is a science. That means that observed phenomena can be linked by hypothesis, illuminated by theory, and integrated by law. It means that effects are subject to analysis by logic, to prediction from experience, to control through cause.

  “A difficult science, I admit.” White shook his bright mane, regretfully. “Necessarily so, because the instrument of research is also the subject. The dissecting knife can’t easily dissect itself. Many times I’ve failed, Claypool. For all my years of effort, I’ve gathered more questions than answers. What, for example, is mind?”

  White’s huge shoulders lifted! heavily, and his intense blue eyes stared away, through a low archway of gleaming calcite, into an avenue of darkness. That was another blind passage, ending in living rock, but little Dawn Hall came running out of it.

  She stood blinking for a moment, as if dazzled by the light, and then came on across the smooth hard sand. Claypool saw a sudden dust of white forming on the worn fur collar of her big leather coat, and on the ragged ribbon in her hair. Her blue knobby knees shook with cold.

  Silently, she handed White a small leather bag. He poured out a little pile of nuggets on a balance pan, and Claypool recognized the platinumlike luster of palladium. In an instant the nuggets were covered with frost, and smoky trails of white condensation drifted down from the pan and flattened on the bench. The child wiggled her bare toes against the sand, and looked at White with huge, adoring eyes.

  “Shall I go back?” she whispered.

  “I think that’s all we need.” He glanced at the frosty mound on the pan, and smiled gently through his flaming beard. “You’ve done a good job, Dawn. Now Graystone has some hot broth waiting for you.”

  “Oh, thank you! I’m glad I needn’t go back, ’cause it’s awful cold out there.”

  She ran on, happily, toward the kitchen alcove. Staring at the dust of frost on her black hair and her coat, Claypool felt a tingle of wonder.

  “It “is cold there,” White was drawling gently. “Those rich gravels must have been washed down a long time ago, because that planet has no erosion now. It’s lost from the star that must have warmed it once, and it has no air or liquid water. The temperature is near the absolute zero.”

  “Eh!” Claypool started, blinking at the bearded giant. “You mean . . . you mean that child can defy the laws of nature?”

  “No.” White shook his massive head. “She merely uses them—I think unconsciously. She just— adapts. She used to be always cold, you see, here in the cave. Lately, somehow, she has learned to keep warm—she can’t tell you how.” White’s drawl held an overtone of awe.

  “I’d like to know how she does it. I suppose she has developed a psychophysical control over the molecular vibrations of heat, and the molecular flow of evaporation, so that she can stop the loss of heat and water and oxygen from her body. I believe she can even disassociate carbon dioxide, to oxygenate her blood. However she does it, she can live on that dead planet—long enough.”

  A cold something moved up Claypool’s spine.

  “Are you sure she’s—human?” he breathed uneasily. “Not some mutation?”

  “She’s human!” White boomed vehemently. “I know that. For all my bungling failures, I know that psychophysical abilities are as old as life. I know they are born in the brain of every man, and they lie there within his unconscious grasp.”

  Exasperation shook his voice.

  “I know that—and yet I’ve failed to reach the real secret of it. Perhaps there is some barrier that I can’t see—perhaps something as obvious as this.”

  Impatiently, he picked up a white ingot, and slammed it down again. Claypool saw the undying hate sweep through his huge body again, like a bitter wind, and blaze like a sullen fire in his eyes. But hate alone, even in such magnificence, would never stop the humanoids. Calm-voiced now, Claypool began pointing out the difficulties.

  “Suppose we do get to Wing IV? Even suppose we find that mechanical brain. Rhodomagnetic relay grids aren’t exactly simple, you know—not even the little gadgets I built to pilot the missiles of Project Thunderbolt.”

  “I know,” White drawled. “I’ve been studying that brain ever since I first met old Sledge. I’ve load Overstreet watching the way it works, and Graystone observing how it thinks. And Dawn has been there!”

  Claypool glanced uneasily across the cavern. Under the white crystal arch of the kitchen alcove, the child sat on a bench before a rough table, waiting while old Graystone filled her steaming bowl. She saw him, and smiled solemnly.

  “She has been in the shop where old Sledge built the first sections of t
he grid,” White went on. “She found it still intact, buried deep in the new relays of the brain. She even found Sledge’s old safe there, still packed full of his notes and drawings and preliminary models. She brought back everything you ought to need.”

  White pointed to a stack of yellowed notebooks and a sheaf of faded blueprints, and pulled out plastic trays filled with tiny stampings and castings and machining® of silvery palladium. Claypool opened one of the books, and frowned at the dim hieroglyphics.

  “It’s not quite so bad as that,” White assured him softly. “Perhaps old Sledge’s notation seems a little strange, but science is a universal language. I can help you with the rudiments he managed to teach me.”

  He gestured at the workbench.

  “All the tools in Sledge’s shop are duplicated here—collected mostly from junk yards where the humanoids are piling up machines that are too dangerous for men to use.”

  A stern amusement lit his face briefly.

  “We’ll build the new grid sections here.” he said. “Enough of them to contain our amendment to the Prime Directive. When they’re done, you and Dawn must go to Wing IV. All you have to do there is cut out the old sections, and install our new ones.”

  Claypool caught his breath. He riffled through a stack of dusty drawings, and turned minute machinings with a careful fingernail.

  “Didn’t Sledge try to change the relays?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “And didn’t the humanoids stop him?”

  “But Sledge didn’t know psychophysics.” White protested softly. “And the humanoids don’t—not yet. They failed to discover Dawn, while she was going through the old shop. I think you’ll have time to change the relays.”

  Claypool blinked at him, doubtfully.’

  “Because the humanoids are actually blind,” the big man explained. “Anywhere else, their rhodomagnetic senses are far quicker and keener than human sight. But there about the grid, the intense rhodomagnetic fields of it interfere with the weaker sensory fields of the individual units.”

  Claypool screwed a jeweler’s lens into his socket, and stirred a tray of microscopic screws with slendernosed tweezers. But his fingers still were stiff and awkward, clammy with a sweat of apprehension.

  “It’s a brain operation, literally. Like the human brain, that grid has no sense organs. You can perform the operation without disturbing the patient—if we’re ready in time.”

  But White’s giant shoulders tightened under the silver cloak, in an attitude of troubled expectancy.

  “I’m afraid our time is running out,” he added, “because the humanoids are building something new on Wing IV. What it is, we can only guess. But my own guess frightens me. Overstreet can see it, and he says it’s as big as the brain machine.

  “Underground levels are full of power plants, he says, and some kind of transformers. Above the ground, they’re building a big dome, of some new synthetic, to cover something else.

  “‘The machines are packing that dome with billions on billions of relays, linked in another grid. But the relays aren’t like those that run the humanoids. For one thing, they are made out of platinum and osmiridium alloys, instead of palladium.”

  Above the red splendor of his beard, White’s cragged face was pale and stark.

  “But we don’t know what it is, and we can’t find out. Because, when the construction of that new grid was well under way, something closed that dome to us. Overstreet can’t see inside it any longer. Dawn tried to enter it, and failed.”

  White’s sullen eyes seemed haunted

  “That barrier isn’t physical,” he rumbled solemnly. “So I’m afraid that the humanoids themselves have begun psychophysical research. And if they have, we must act without any great delay.”

  XX.

  Oh the mother world, in the dim past, men had sought the philosopher’s stone. That fabulous stuff was to turn base metals to gold, and human confusion to shining understanding. Discovered at last, it proved to be common iron.

  Magical metal of the first atomic triad, iron created the new science of electromagnetics. It wrought all the marvels of electronics, and even freed atomic energy. Electromagnetics actually achieved the dream of the alchemists, and men manufactured elements.

  Philosophers tried the new wonder stone on the common facts of the universe, and most of them responded. The electromagnetic spectrum ran from radio waves to cosmic rays, and mathematicians dreamed of a unified field equation.

  A few facts, however, were stubborn. A few phenomena, as various as the binding force which contained the energy of atoms and the repulsion which separated galaxies, perversely refused to join the electromagnetic system. Iron alone was not enough.

  But then men tried palladium.

  Claypool and Sledge, working far apart in time and space, both had shaped that precious white metal from the second triad into, another key, to open another science. The last tragic gift of iron had been the atomic bomb. Palladium gave men Project Thunderbolt, and the humanoids.

  Claypool sometimes thought wistfully of that sublime and tortured hour, back at Starmont, when he thought that shining key had opened the ultimate goal of knowledge to him. All the laws of the universe, he thought at first, might be derived from his basic equation for the rhodomagnetic field.

  He stumbled out of the observatory, in the blue chill on a windy winter dawn, to hammer and shout at the door of the computing section. He roused Ironsmith at last, and pushed his sheaf of hasty calculations at that sleepy-eyed youth.

  “A rush job,” he barked impatiently. “I want you to check all these, right away—particularly this derivation for rho.” Then he noticed Ironsmith’s blinking astonishment, and started to apologize for his urgency.

  “That’s all right, sir,” Ironsmith assured him cheerfully. “I was running the machines until an hour ago, anyhow, playing around with a new tensor of my own. Things like this aren’t work to me, sir.”

  Burning with impatience, Claypool watched him glance indolently through the pages of hurried symbols. His pink face frowned a little, and he shook his sandy head. He said nothing, but turned with an infuriating deliberation to his keyboards and began deftly punching his paper tapes, setting up the problem in a pattern of holes that the electronic machines could read.

  Too restless to wait on the murmuring, unconcerned machines. Claypool went out again, to stalk the lawns of Starmont like a planet-bound god. Watching the dawn turn golden on the desert, he thought his groping mind had grasped a mightier power than abided in the rising sun. For an hour he was great.

  Then Ironsmith came pedaling after him down a gravel walk, yawning sleepily and chewing gum, to shatter all the splendor of his vision.

  “I found a little error, sir.” Ironsmith was grinning with a modest amiability, unaware of the staggering blow his words inflicted.

  “I think you can see it, sir, right here. Your symbol rho is irrelevant, and it has no obtainable value. Everything else is correct.”

  Claypool tried not to show how much that hurt him. He thanked the lean youth on the bicycle, and stumbled dazedly back to his desk. Ironsmith had seen only a symbol that canceled out, but he had felt the ultimate treasure of the universe slipping through his clutching fingers.

  His basic equation remained true enough. Rhodomagnetic energy, with its infinite velocity of propagation and its inverse variation with the first power of the distance, was still the mightiest force that man had ever found.

  Yet the two, palladium and iron, still were not enough.

  Hiding from the humanoids now, in that deep limestone cavern, Claypool heard the haunting whisper of dark water running through passages too small for a man. He shrank from the crushing pressure of those calcite-crusted walls, and shivered to the air’s dead chill, and tried not to see the crawling blackness in every blind crevice.

  He set out to study the laws and the mocking contradictions of White’s half-science of psychophysics. He grasped at the amazing arts of old Graystone, and th
e telekinetic skills of little Lucky Ford. He sought the far vision of Overstreet’s myopic eyes, and the ultimate fleetness of Dawn Hall’s grimy little feet.

  Watching the child flit out of that closed cavern and back again, to bring some useful tool that Overstreet’s far searching had discovered, Claypool accepted the fact of her ability, and he strove to shape a rational theory for it.

  “All this used to seem impossible,” he confessed to White. “But now I think I see how psychophysics can fit into the established laws of quantum mechanics. Teleportation, now—that could be a matter of exchange-force probability.”

  The huge man looked up from his work at the bench, blue eyes alert.

  “Perhaps you know the theory? Anyhow, the exchange-force concept arises from the fact that electrons are identical. Mathematically, any movement of any electron can be treated merely as, a change of identity with another. And the forces of such exchanges—like most subatomic phenomena—are governed by probability.”

  “But—about teleportation?”

  Claypool stared past the other, •it the closed, calcite-frosted walls of that deep crypt. Something cold touched his spine. He felt numbed with an icy wonder, that any act of the mind could open that living stone. But he had seen Dawn come and go, and now he thought he saw the way.

  “Those forces are timeless— there’s a place for them in rhodomagnetics,” he said. “And they aren’t limited to short distances— except by a factor of decreasing probability. Because each electron is only a reinforcement in a standing wave-pattern—which theoretically pervades the whole universe.” He gulped an eager breath.

  “I think that’s it! When Dawn visits that cold planet, I think there is no actual movement of matter, but only a shifting of patterns of identity.” He nodded, pleased with that distinction. “I don’t know the precise mechanism of atomic probability, but Dawn has already showed that she can operate it to detonate unstable atoms. Perhaps teleportation is just as easy!”